Astranis begins final assembly of Alaska satellite following successful test of Software-Defined Radio payload

Astranis, the company building the next generation of telecommunications satellites, announced today that it has begun final assembly of its satellite for Alaska. The satellite is slated to ship out later this year for launch on a SpaceX rocket and begin service from Geostationary Orbit (GEO) in early 2022. This will be the first time Alaska has ever had its own dedicated satellite, providing broadband internet across the state.

Beginning final assembly is an important milestone in the manufacturing of Astranis’s first commercial satellite, and follows a successful end-to-end payload test that showed a capacity 20% greater than the spec. The end-to-end payload test was an integrated test of the flight payload hardware, across the full receive and transmit chains, including the Low-Noise Amplifiers (LNAs), upconverters, downconverters, Traveling Wave Tube Power Amplifiers (TWTAs) and Astranis’s ultra-wideband Software-Defined Radio digital processor. The Astranis Software-Defined Radio is a proprietary technology entirely designed, built, and space-qualified by Astranis over the past four years. It uses the latest technology in digital signal processing to provide frequency flexibility across 2.5 GHz of spectrum, create thousands of independently routable channels, maximize spectral efficiency, and enable reconfiguration on orbit. 

Astranis CEO John Gedmark said, “It’s hard to overstate the importance of this test of the satellite’s performance: we expected to be able to deliver 7.5 Gbps to Alaska, and it looks like we will ultimately deliver as much as 20% more, or around 10 Gbps. That means the Astranis-PDI partnership will bring affordable broadband to that many more people. The Astranis technical team has done an incredible job executing to get us here, and we’re excited to start service soon.”

This end-to-end payload test follows months of rigorous testing and review to ensure the program’s success, including a Critical Design Review hosted by former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and successful qualification testing of a full-scale prototype, including thermal-vacuum, vibration, and acoustic testing.

Given Alaska’s rugged terrain and remote population centers, the state has long faced one of the sharpest digital divides in the United States. According to Broadband Now, 39% of Alaskans are underserved when it comes to internet access — the highest rate of any state. The Astranis satellite will roughly triple the currently available satellite capacity in Alaska while also bringing costs down to one third of current pricing for both residential and wholesale customers.

Pacific Dataport Inc. CEO Chuck Schumann said,
“The PDI team is very pleased with Astranis’s steady, methodical progress towards delivering this much-needed and game-changing satellite to orbit. We know Astranis is working around the clock to ensure that this program is a resounding success, and it’s inspiring to see such a strong, concerted effort focused on a state traditionally overlooked by major satellite players. This Astranis satellite is built for Alaska, and we are eager to see it head to our orbital location directly in line with Alaska.”

Astranis’s Alaska satellite, named Arcturus after the brightest star in the northern hemisphere, will serve as the first satellite of Pacific Dataport, Inc.’s Aurora system.

About Astranis

Astranis is building small, low-cost telecommunications satellites to connect the four billion people who currently do not have access to the internet. Each spacecraft operates from geostationary orbit (GEO) with a next-generation design of only 400 kg, utilizing a proprietary software-defined radio payload. This unique digital payload technology allows frequency and coverage flexibility, as well as maximum use of valuable spectrum. By owning and operating its satellites and offering them to customers as a turnkey solution, Astranis is able to provide bandwidth-as-a-service and unlock previously unreachable markets. This allows Astranis to launch small, dedicated satellites for small and medium-sized countries, Fortune 500 companies, existing satellite operators, and other customers.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco with a team of over 150, including world-class engineers from SpaceX, Boeing, Skybox, Qualcomm, Apple, and Google. Astranis has raised over $350M from top Silicon Valley and growth investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Venrock, and BlackRock.

About Pacific Dataport

PACIFIC DATAPORT INC. (PDI), located in Anchorage, Alaska, is focused on providing affordable middle mile and last mile broadband using the newest satellite technology. PDI clients include telecoms (wired & wireless), health clinics, schools, libraries, governments (Tribal, local, state & federal) and Alaska Native Corporations, Villages and Tribes. PDI is launching the Astranis GEO HTS satellite as part of the Aurora project designed to bring broadband to all of Alaska. The Aurora Network will increase Alaska’s middle mile broadband capacity to deliver more affordable, high-quality broadband to ALL Alaskans, regardless of location.